For years now we’ve been hosting the collaborative word list at my personal web site, and it’s been fine, but there are a few disadvantages. First, the list is completely reliant on my website, and if it goes down or changes something the list is down. Second, the updater program is a packaged perl script (!!!) that no one should be installing on their computer, because why should you trust me? To make things worse, this script stopped working on Macs a while back. Third, a detailed history of changes to the list were invisible to anyone but me, which isn’t ideal.
GitHub always seemed like a logical location to host the list, save for one technical issue. If someone makes one change to the list and then completely reorders it, GitHub won’t be able to tell what changed, and will assume it’s just an entirely new file. Being able to tell what changed at any moment is very important here, so this technical problem kept us from making the switch … until now.
Thanks to a friend who wishes to remain anonymous, we’re now leveraging the power of GitHub Actions and we can present to you the brand new collaborative word list in its new location on GitHub. Do you want to join and help contribute? That’s wonderful! We’ve created a video tutorial on how to get started which I highly recommend you watch. You’ll need to create a GitHub account, ask us to add you as a contributor, and you’re off. If there are any questions at all, please leave a comment or send us an email, and we’ll try to help you out.
If going through GitHub sounds like too much of a hassle for you, no worries. This list is free for all to use in any way they please. You can download the list right now if you want. While we prefer people to actively contribute and maintain the list, we are believers that access to a good word list should not be a barrier to entry for any up-and-coming constructors. Even veterans may be able to find a nugget or two in the list. So feel free to just take it and start using it. We would appreciate a comment if you do so, though. Enjoy!